Heavenly Creatures, 1994.
More you might like
Where do you get off behaving that way with women you don’t even know, huh? How’d you feel if someone did that to your mother or your sister or your wife?
Louise Sawyer | Thelma & Louise dir. Ridley Scott
Challenge 17: Normalizing Sociopathology
One of the most chillingly unfeeling characters I’ve ever been exposed to is Meursault from The Stranger by Albert Camus (which capped the end of my high school assigned reading pretty nicely. It was one heck of a novel). From the renowned first lines, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure”, to his unshakeable apathy until the end of the novel, his lack of feeling allows him to fit the definition of a ‘sociopath’, specifically the definition that’s most accessible and comprehensible to the general public.
A quick google search, even just pitting the name “Meursault” and the word “sociopath” together, ushers in many articles and forum discussions that debate whether Camus’ character is truly a sociopath or perhaps a tragic hero.
From what I remember from this character and this overall reading experience, I think labeling Meursault as a sociopath limits the complex implication of Camus’ philosophy. The character’s lack of apathy and feeling appalled the crowd of people within the fictional universe and those within the real one–us, the readers. But our knee-jerk reaction to call him “sociopath” promotes our inclination to chalk up the incomprehensible to their innate “otherness”. Their “strangeness”.
Beyond more than just being an instrument to better articulate Camus’ ideas of the absurd, I believe Meursault’s character falls prey to this “glamorization” of the sociopath as well.